46 Decay of National Physique. 



higher conception of education and increased attention to its 

 demands has arisen a new danger. Intellectual cultivation 

 may be pursued at the expense of physical strength, and the 

 pressure of school and college competition might induce a 

 neglect of those physical exercises and manly sports which to 

 the growing child and youth are not less vitally essential than 

 the training of the mind. Real danger lurks in the portentous 

 development of the modern system of examinations. The 

 child undergoes a monthly examination, to which are soon 

 added the severer tests of the Intermediate Board, and thence 

 until he graduates in the university at the age of 21 or 22 he 

 lives mainly to be examined. 



This is the fire through which most of the youths who 

 gave evidence of intellectual promise have to pass, and it is 

 not surprising that some of the most brilliant drop into 

 premature graves, and that others survive with permanent 

 injury to health. Herbert Spencer says : " Nature is a strict 

 accountant, and if you demand of her in one direction more 

 than she is prepared to lay out, she balances the account by 

 making a deduction elsewhere." A report recently issued by 

 the Austrian Minister of Public Instruction shows that the 

 education of the middle classes there is chargeable with over- 

 pressure and all its attendant evils. In England the question 

 has become the sport of angry controversy, so that it is 

 difficult to guage the precise extent of the evil ; but there is 

 little evidence to show ■ that it is sufficiently grave and 

 widespread to constitute a genuine factor working for the decay 

 of national physique. It is one thing to admit the existence 

 of an evil ; it is quite another to exalt it to the dignity 

 of a grave public danger, threatening the permanent physical 

 integrity of the race. As he indicated the sources of evil, it 

 must have struck his audience how the efforts of public bodies 

 and private benefactors, of philanthropy, of hygiene, and pre- 

 ventive medicine were constantly and earnestly directed to their 

 mitigation or removal. 



Dr. Lindsay then reviewed the remedies suggested for these 

 evils. We endeavour to preserve pure air for town popu- 



